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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

A family member of mine got horribly addicted to FarmVille back in like 2008-2009. He would sneak off from the family to go upstairs to grab something and then we would find him there three hours later playing. He built up a huge farm and since it had the mechanic for visiting nearby farms became quite famous. Then one of his daughters, who was a freshman in college at the time, came home with a few of her friends. The family member mentioned FarmVille at one point and all these teenagers went “omg you are [his game name]?!?!?!” He quite literally became an in game celebrity for a time apparently. He quit a few months later and never went back.

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Sometimes when I see people showing off these vast and intricate minecraft structures, Sims games, animal crossing towns, etc I wonder what social toll it took to get there. There's a lot of applauding people throwing healthier aspects of their lives away for game addiction on places like reddit or facebook. The story of the addict ignoring his kids, jobs, health, etc almost never gets out. It did briefly for WoW when "warcraft wives" made a fuss, but that died out, I imagine who no small PR effort from Blizzard, and now game addiction is rarely talked about, which is odd, considering so many mobile games are pretty much casinos.

Don't forget about Factorio !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY2nxVNBHQs

The most famous meme being probably :

https://i.imgur.com/FxRUB2A.png

This narrative also applies to software. I often look at OSS projects and wonder the same.

This applies really to anything you're passionate about.

FarmVille launched June 2009, so it probably wasn’t 2008 :) But yeah, video game addiction is a real thing, I know lots of people who’ve been addicted to all sorts of games, to the detriment of their lives overall.

Yup you are right. He got in right at the start.

Total tangent, but Malcolm Gladwell has two really excellent podcast episodes about memory (Revisionist History, season 3, episodes 3 and 4: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/23-a-polite-word-for-...). Basically, it’s WAY less accurate than we think, and the least accurate part is everything about time - when things happened, and even the order than they happened in. Worth a listen if you have some time to kill.

My favorite story: growing up, I was really good friends with this girl who's Mom was an Everquest dev (like, the first one.)

Post-launch, she became so addicted to her own game, she had to quit her job and lived in a small apt, forgoing clothes and only eaing the easiest of food.

At the time it was funny...

So what ended up happening to her?

Last I saw her, she had transitioned to WoW and was scraping by running conventions. I wish I remembered her last name, I'm curious what her daughter made of herself.

Was her name Pygmalion?

Absolutely. This happened to a friend from university. He started off with "ogame". A web based space sim. Initially it was ok and we even went to play it with him (entirely free to play) in our clique. Given we were studying comp sci it also wasn't surprising that he programmed himself some helpers for ratios, targeting of other players etc. Shortly after he started Eve Online. Same thing just with an actual nice 3d space sim around it. He'd optimize the hell out of everything including setting his alarm clock for 3am because his character would finish a skill at that time so that he wouldn't waste 3 hours until normal wakeup time. Shortly after he stopped going to uni with us, which worked for a while until he also no longer found time to study on his own and his sleep cycle was completely dominated by the game. I think he never finished uni and I'm not sure what became of him. Other than probably being really well off inside of Eve.

So sad.

I know a lot of people like this. Many are cryptocurrency miners or traders now, and are doing okay.

Game mechanics gonna game mechanic, I guess. :)

Yeah, I have a friend who got similarly addicted to WoW during undergrad, and dropped out.

I also have a friend who dropped out of high school for games, but it worked out! He became a fairly high end professional Counter-Strike player, moved to South Korea for awhile. Then when the CS professional scene stopped being as lucrative, online poker was taking off, he moved to online poker, and did VERY well financially off of that: https://www.sk-gaming.com/content/1844754-shaguar-to-run-cs-...

When he dropped out of high school to play CS, his parents were obviously very worried, but he treated it like a job and did really well.

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